VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene working on a new stealth project

If you thought virtualization enthusiasts had forgotten about the name Diane Greene, the ex-CEO and co-founder of VMware, you thought wrong. It’s been five years since Greene was abruptly removed from power and dethroned as the CEO of VMware, but the name still rings true with VMware users.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, you might remember the commercials from the financial world with the famous slogan, “When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen.” Decades later, for those of us in the virtualization world, we know that when Diane Greene’s name is mentioned, people listen.

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After starting a company in 1998 that ultimately caused a swarm of data center administrators to brand their cars, computers, and bodies with the VMware logo, Greene still has a cultlike virtualization following that is waiting to see “what’s next” from this technologist. She’s been out of the limelight for the past five years, and people have been anxiously awaiting to see if she has something new and innovative up her sleeve. In essence, people are waiting for the next big idea.

The latest rumor started last month when Diane Greene’s name was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article talking about Cumulus Networks emerging from stealth mode. The company announced $15 million in venture capital funding, part of which came from the investment of Diane Greene who said she invested “because of the disruptive nature of the company.”

But the line within that article that really caught the attention of virtualization reporters was when Greene told the Wall Street Journal that she needed a solution like Cumulus to provide “a switch and a scalable data center for her own new project.”

Just like that, four tiny little words — “her own new project” — caused quite a stir.

Since being ousted as CEO of VMware back in July 2008, Greene has remained fairly quiet. Prior to her tenure at VMware, Greene held technical leadership positions at Silicon Graphics, Tandem Computers, and Sybase; she was also the CEO of VXtreme. Since her departure from VMware, Greene has become an active angel investor, reportedly providing investments to companies such as Cloudera, CloudPhysics, Cumulus Networks, Nicira, Nimbula, Pure Storage, Typesafe, and Unity Technologies. She’s also on the board of Intuit, and more recently Greene joined the Google board of directors in January 2012.

Now, it sounds like Greene is ready to get back in the game, no longer satisfied with sitting on the sidelines as an investor. 

Rumors first began circulating that Greene was about to target storage giant EMC with a new Silicon Valley-based storage virtualization company coming out of stealth mode called Datrium Storage. The rumor spread quickly without any solid facts, instead powered by calls for karma.

You see, it was EMC’s chief executive, Joe Tucci, who was said to have engineered Greene’s removal from VMware five years after the storage giant acquired the virtualization company in 2003. Tucci replaced Greene with Paul Maritz, who now leads EMC’s cloud spinoff Pivotal. Greene and Tucci didn’t see eye to eye, and she may have been blamed for VMware’s missed revenue targets.

Datrium is said to be targeting cloud customers and service providers with its own storage solution. While the company is still very much in stealth mode, it appears to be quickly gobbling up talent with many of its initial team members coming from Data Domain, EMC, and VMware backgrounds.

Many in the industry are reporting that Datrium is Greene’s “new project,” but that may not necessarily be the case. According to LinkedIn, the company is co-founded by former Data Domain, EMC, and VMware employees such as Brian Biles, CEO; Hugo Patterson, CTO; Boris Weissman; and Ganesh Venkitachalam. Diane Greene’s name isn’t mentioned anywhere in association with this company, and if she were coming on board, one would expect she’d do so as the CEO of the company — a position that is clearly already filled by Biles.

If Diane Greene isn’t a co-founder and isn’t coming back into the limelight as an executive with Datrium, what is her next project? That remains to be seen. However, other rumors have Greene going after other high-profile VMware employees who have recently left the mothership. Without seeing anyone officially land somewhere with Greene, ex-VMware employee names like Bogomil Balkansky and Mike Nelson are being tossed around as joining this yet-to-be confirmed or named stealth startup.

For now, it looks like we’ll just have to sit back and wait for the next rumor — or better yet, an official announcement — to cross the wire. Until such time, one thing is certain: Whatever this new project is, it must be something exciting, challenging, and game-changing if Diane Greene has personally decided to take things on herself.

This article, “VMware co-founder and former CEO Diane Greene working on a new stealth project,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.